The vital need for water policy reform

The violent demonstrations that occurred last week at the World Water Forum in Istanbul belie the seriousness of the global water crisis. Currently, human population growth is the highest in places where there is the least water. There is legitimate concern that in many parts of the world we cannot meet both agricultural and urban water needs while at the same time providing enough water to ensure the perpetuation of natural ecosystem function.

As a consequence of growing populations and increased competition for land and water, humanity is converging upon the need to make uncommonly difficult public policy trade-offs that have never had to be made on a global scale before. If we provide to nature the water it needs to perpetuate our planetary life-support system, then much of that water will have to come at the expense of agriculture, which means that many people will have to starve to meet ecosystem protection goals. If, on the other hand, we provide agriculture all the water it needs to have any hope of feeding the populations that are projected to exist even in 2025, then we must expect ongoing deterioration of the biodiversity-based ecosystem function that has generated Earth’s conditions upon which our society depends both for its stability and sustainability. Unfortunately, around the world we are already, often without fully realizing it, making such choices.

The global water crisis has enormous implications for Canada. First, it puts into relief our own water resource management problems. Second, we are beginning to realize that as water scarcity affects other food growing regions more and more water is going to be exported not in its liquid form, but as virtual water embodied in food. Before we can fix our own problems or begin to realize any opportunity in what is happening elsewhere, however, we need to get our own house in order.

The first thing we need to do is to dispel the myth of limitless abundance of water resources. Moreover, most of our water is in the north and most Canadians live in the south. We also need to improve the monitoring of surface and groundwater quantity and quality. We also need to make the link between enhanced monitoring and improved water availability forecasting and long-term climate change prediction. We also have to embrace eco-hydrological realities and come to understand and protect ecosystems and ecosystem functions that generate clean water.

To make food production in Canada sustainable, we have to solve our own water availability and quality challenges related to agricultural practices. We have to reverse the growing eutrophication of our lakes, watercourses and estuaries caused by widespread agricultural nutrient loading, pesticide contamination and wetland draining. We have to reassess policies with respect to biofuel production in the context of their impact on water supply, land-use and the future availability of productive farmland. We must also protect the long-term future of our agriculture by improving our effectiveness in anticipating and managing the growing likelihood of prolonged drought. In addition, we need to actively anticipate future climate change impacts on both water supply and quality.

We cannot rely simply on the invisible hand of the marketplace to somehow make all of the necessary improvements happen. Well operating markets depend upon a strong regulatory frameworks and functioning government oversight. The same is true in the case of water utility privatization.

Canadian policy-makers need to ask the same fundamental questions that continue to be asked around the increasingly water-scarce world. What is our water policy really about? Is it about market efficiency? Is it about decentralization and local participation? Or is it about sustainability? Or is it about all of these ideals? Unfortunately, solving one of these problems is not enough. We have to solve them all.

We cannot be successful in solving our own water problems or in helping address the growing global water crisis through virtual water export unless we can effectively summons the courage to reform our nation’s and our province’s administratively fragmented and jurisdictionally territorial water governance structures in service of these goals. Moving prematurely toward markets without integrating them first into the larger water management solutions could ultimately delay and complicate necessary higher-level water policy reform. The growing desire to create water markets, however, could be the urgency that realizes the need and creates badly needed impetus and deadlines for larger water policy reforms.

Unlike so many other places in the world, Canada still has room to move in terms of how we manage our water resources. But the window of opportunity for change will not be open long. Our planet’s hydrological regimes are changing. This is no time for half measures. What is needed now is strong government leadership.

If we can balance the water availability and quality needs of nature, agriculture and our cities, everything else we need to do, including climate change, may very well fall into line.

If we don’t, however, we can expect the dry West to become drier and the problems that are occurring elsewhere to occur here.

Bob Sandford is the chair of the Canadian Partnership initiative in support of the United Nations Water for Life decade. He is also a signatory, along with many of Canada’s most prominent scientists and water policy scholars, of the 2008 Canadian Pugwash and Science for Peace Declaration calling for federal and provincial water governance and Policy reform in Canada.

Reprinted from an article published in “Calgary Herald” March 24, 2009.